kky
5d ago
You don’t even live in the US, right? Or am I forgetting? Why is this element of domestic politics hitting you so hard? I can understand the emotion from people who live here, but I’m a little surprised by your take.
Yeah, no duh it sucks what happened to him. But nobody cares about lock-out-tag-out until some poor Mexican gets filleted. Very often the only way things change is through truly horrifying consequences. I’m not suggesting you shrug about an assassination. It’s normal, human to be rattled by it. But it’s right to control your response, to think about what did and did not happen, what it does and doesn’t mean for you. A lot of people are reading this as “Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.” I don’t think that’s right. I think a lot of malicious idiots on the left were getting excused for their language - sanewashing - for much longer than they had any right to, and finally enough truly insane people are coming out of the woodwork that the normies are shook. I know I am. But this place in particular does not need more doomposting. To my lefty friends and family, I’ve been saying this is important, language matters. Here. I say to take it in stride. The consistency? Lowering the temperature. Even if that might be upsetting.
kky
5d ago
What do you mean? I answered you pretty clearly, I think. If Freddie is being consistent, his view would match mine, but he’s a bipolar Marxist and I frankly can’t promise anything of him. The essay in question was quite good, though, and I wanted to highlight the central message I found in it.
Your turn. Want to explain yourself?
kky
5d ago
Dunno 100% for Freddie, but you can have my word for it now, if you’d like.
If a psycho shoots any prominent lefty figure it does not, in itself, reflect poorly on right wingers or Trump. If they celebrate the death, that celebration reflects poorly on them. That’s it. The right wingers are justified in continuing to believe in gun rights and the Great Replacement or whatever else.
That’s pretty easy for me to say, of course, given that I’m not particularly left or right. But if it’s consolation, I really do believe it.
kky
5d ago
I suggest reworking your parallel here - in the first case, an active external system should have locked the guy away. In the second, a set of ideas should have inspired a lost young man differently. Why should we have not locked him up instead? Or relied on friendly pluralism to convince a madman to not stab a stranger? It’s hard to reconcile the analogy.
kky
5d ago
Alright, but my unaddressed point is - does anything matter then, in a concrete sense?
Yes, of course - not killing anyone would matter quite a lot, most of all to the family of the deceased.
Don’t get me wrong. The uncontrolled rhetoric coming out of the left has done a lot to further chaos, and responding to that as chaos to be suppressed is a reasonable choice. But I think Freddie is right that the ideology of violence is not spurred by leftism qua leftism, it’s spurred by a desire for violence. This desire itself creates and justifies the ideology. If you want to quell the ideology, then your real port of call must be to handle the desire for violence.
I’m sure you see it on this forum. There are people whose select purpose is baying for the blood of the other, and I suspect some of them are just interested in blood itself. There are also those who resist the impulse, but! as one can clearly see, the radical and chaotic act spurs their sentiments towards chaos. There is some danger of a “leftist” copycat killer, but do not discount Chadwick Westfallen deciding that this tat needs a tit. And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them. The response is what feeds chaos, the strange attractor. Or, for another example, a black man died in police custody under questionable circumstances, and instead of individual justice and a reform towards order, a lot of people went out burning things. Their response fed chaos. But this time, it looks to be different.
In my humble opinion, the actual response to this event is about as good as you’re gonna get. They caught the killer and he’s got a good chance of frying for it. Some chaos-infected dipshits on Twitter tried to cheer him on and are getting punished for it. Establishment left mouthpieces are having to show message discipline for the first time in years. The system is tamping down on these excesses. It is curbing the feedback loop. There is still the problem of young people without meaning, and this will continue for some time, probably until the demographic collapse starts leveling. But so long as support for this killer remains beyond acceptable public discourse, the worst is held off.
That’s why I think Freddie is overall right about this. There is a cycle feeding chaos, and it is visible, and the specific agents and purposes do not matter as much as whether the act itself incites people to respond in kind. The urges driving the chaos have little to do with sides and are about chaos itself. The correct way to respond to these events is without reference to sides, and to prefer to oppose chaos itself. The killer was wrong. The people supporting him are wrong. The people opposing the killer’s “side” are right insofar as they demand that people should not support chaos, and wrong insofar as they demand vengeance upon people who did not praise the killing. It really is as simple as that.
kky
5d ago
and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target.
That’s not the claim. The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.
I think the confusion here is down to thinking about this in terms of sides, like Charlie Kirk dying was a victory for the left against the right, which can be excused given there are a lot of braindead leftists acting like it on social media. Freddie’s point is that the winning side is chaos itself, and that this would be true even if it had been Mr. Based Hyperborean ventilating a Young Democrats outreach lady.
I’ve been using analogies to the Third Republic lately, so I’ll keep on a roll. Leading up to the catastrophe of the Battle of France, the left (commies) and right (crowncucks) were in a state of near war. But every act they took against one another didn’t solidify their control, it tore the country apart. And in the wreckage, neither of them were left in power. That privilege was reserved to Hitler.
I hope that makes the argument clear.
I think this is a misreading of a fairly subtle piece. Freddie may be a Marxist, but he ain’t stupid.
The point of this essay is that the so-called political motivations lie beneath the real motivation, which is a self-contained urge towards meaning that has otherwise been thwarted. Being frustrated in an ordinary search for meaning, the young men attempt to summon it through violence. The way they want us to see it is: they believed so strongly in X that they were willing to resort to violence. The real ordering is: they could only believe in belief on the basis of violence. Violence, with its hard reality, supplements the unreal world in which these young men live.
His parallel to anarchists, the propaganda of the deed, is apt. The point there was violence - to prove violence was possible, to encourage others towards violence. The purpose was to harm. Everything other than hurting fell away. It was pretty nasty.
Ideology is a sleight of hand. Look, I’m doing this for a reason, I’m committed… but the only commitment seems to have been to violence. What else did this kid do? It’s like Uncle Ted. Only thing he did was live in a cabin. Then he wanted to mail people bombs, so he wrote a manifesto so he’d have a reason. Why not set up a Thoreauean intentional living community? Make it make sense.
Freddie is saying: take it from me, I know lunatics. They give you reasons and words words words, but the cause was festering inside them the whole time, they just found something to latch onto. Don’t trust them to know why, and don’t trust them to tell you.
EDIT: Adding a little clarity.
Let’s say you ask a paranoid schizo who’s behind everything that happens. He’s gonna tell you: the Jews, duh. But let’s say that same schizo is Chinese. Jews aren’t a big thing over there. He doesn’t have a ready-made ideology to latch onto. So when you ask him who’s behind it all, does he say nobody, it’s a very complex multi-agent system? Non, monsieur. He’s got an answer ready-made. The reason he thinks it’s the Jews specifically would be antisemitism. But the reason he thinks it’s someone is the schizophrenia.
Freddie says that Tyler Robinson is the schizo in this analogy, and that there’s something in the water driving people crazy this way. Stamping out the Jew-hatred isn't gonna unpoison our well.
kky
5d ago
If Freddie is right, then successfully eliminating every trace of the shooter’s supposed ideology would be a temporary fix at best. The problem is that there is a force (his “strange attractor”) unmooring young men and making them more prone to violence, and that absent one ideology they will find another.
This is a fairly concrete objection to focusing on political rhetoric in favor of understanding the cycle of chaos that he posits as the real driving force here.
kky
5d ago
The alternative slate of electors are not "unfamiliar people" anymore than the state-certified slate of electors are "unfamiliar people."
The description here is meant to evoke a plausible description of how the coup would be executed without being disrupted in the moment. In reality, it was disrupted in the moment, so explaining experientially what it would be like for the Congressmen on the ground matters. It’s not a contrast between this elector and that fake elector.
This has been done many times throughout US history. Trump's plan wasn't to simply accept the alternative slate of electors, it was to refuse to count the electors from some states and demand a debate and/or inquiry and if this failed to produce the required number of electoral college electors then the election would be thrown to the House, something which as been done multiple times in US history.
I think, in order for this statement to be supportable, you need two detailed examples. Then we can argue whether this was or was not comparable. But as it stands this is a bare assertion.
Why do you think the same comment would be wrong to have been written from the other perspective here? Eastman's plan wasn't to "undo the results of the election," it was contesting the results of the election.
Contrast the Bush-Gore kerfuffle. Immediately after the election, Florida law and Gore demanded a recount, which was immediately performed. Gore contested that result to the Supreme Court, which was decided in December. By the time that electoral certification rolled around the affair had been decided. Trump also submitted lawsuits, but these were rejected quite early. The Supreme Court was not willing to listen to him. So, by the time Jan 6 came about, the affair had been decided.
What Eastman proposed to do was not a method of contesting results. The results were already contested, and contesting them had failed. He was proposing to replace the results.
The analogy here would be if Gore had tried to declare that he was actually President and that the Supreme Court case was decided unjustly. Could you explain, without reference to facts of the election (because facts are the subject being contested in court here, and Gore and Trump lost in court), on a procedural basis, why Gore’s hypothetical rejection here would be invalid while Trump’s would be valid? Or if both are valid, what are the necessary and just steps that would then be taken to fix things and get a President in the two weeks leading up to the inauguration? Or do we not get a new President at all?
Not really. Much like each string of events you wargamed, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. At each of these stages, the escalation can fail for a variety of reasons, much like Trump simply stopping and going home to Florida.
Absolutely true. I’m assuming that a successful coup on Jan 6 emboldens Trump and makes him fear for his safety if he tries getting off the metaphorical tiger. If he seriously attempts to hold onto power, however, it’s extremely doubtful to me that Biden just accepts it (because this legitimizes every future attempt in the same vein) and then you wind up with men with guns trying to decide which authority to listen to. The nice version of this is that they all pick one side or the other, and the nasty version is that they split roughly down the middle.
Notably, Harris did not even attempt to contest the 2024 election, and most of the same “election stealing” was in place from the last time. With all due respect, I don’t have much patience for the claim that the election was stolen. It is extraordinarily shady and motivated reasoning. I understand that the event must have been very upsetting, but the truth has higher standards. So forgive me for not really engaging with that half of your post. I just don’t see anything there to talk about.
kky
5d ago
Lol Gaullist propaganda. The British, Americans and Soviets won it and the British and Americans graciously allowed de Gaulle to take some of the credit in order to ensure an anti-communist government in post-war France.
What do you mean? He organized military and paramilitary resistance to German forces and successfully negotiated with key allies to achieve his main war goals. What you’re expressing here is an astonishingly naive view on war: that it only “counts” if it’s all on the backs of your own troops. The reality of war is that the winner wins. Nothing else matters, although losers love to find excuses. Napoleon is a great example of a loser here - spent a lot of time making excuses in his last exile. Weygand too, from the safety of a country that other men liberated. I recommend against taking the perspective of losers.
And there is no vote on-screen, and canon material consistently describes the declaration of the Empire as a proclamation, not the result of a vote.
I don’t remember that detail from the film, but it has been many years. If that’s so, it’s so, and the comparison to Caesar would be more appropriate. (I’d hold that Napoleon in particular is a bad comparison. The representatives were deliberating over whether to declare him an outlaw when he came back with men with guns and dispersed them permanently.)
kky
5d ago
Sure.
Jan 6, a group of protesters gathers around the Capitol, some breaking in. They are under the impression they are demanding a recount and an investigation into fraud. Inside, a group of Trump loyalists inform the frightened Congressmen that they are demanding a corrected record, and there is no telling what they might do. A set of unfamiliar people, claiming to be electors, arrive and announce an alternative slate for Trump. Dissent is quashed by law enforcement, which says the situation is “dangerous” and that loud debate may draw attention. Pence walks in, and announces that in accordance with the text of the Constitution, he can verify electors. He verifies the new one. The people present do not know what to do, and do not oppose this move. Pence declares Trump as the continuing President.
Jan 7. News of this event comes out. America is immediately divided. Trump claims that he is President. Biden claims he won the election, and is now the president. Congressional Democrats move to invalidate the Jan 6 decision. Trump loyalists in Congress oppose the move strongly. Most Republicans aren’t sure what to do, and try to delay. A few days later, the first protests are organized and start. After nightfall they quickly descend into riots. MAGA counterprotests immediately follow. Mayors attempt to control the worst of it with riot police, but they increasingly struggle to control the crowds and opt to let the two sides have it out. News channels blast opposing viewpoints, and one-up each other in extreme language. Despite all this, things are eerily silent, and nothing really changes leading up to inauguration.
Jan 20. Trump arranges an inauguration in Washington DC. He deploys the National Guard around it. Biden, citing concerns for safety, withdraws to NYC and holds his inauguration there. Congressional Democrats go with him.
Jan 21. Biden, as President, orders the National Guard to defend him as he moves into the White House and displaces the pretender. Trump countermands that order. Both demand that the other be arrested. Some Guardsmen agree to support each side, and the civil war begins. What happens next depends on chance and individual conscience and is beyond predicting.
I hope I’ve made my point. The natural result of the plot was two people declaring their formal status as President at the same time. The moment one of them tries to exercise his executive authority you have a civil war. This is not particularly imaginative; this is what happens in history, over and over again, whenever you have a succession crisis that isn’t nipped in the bud. In reality, Trump backed down and the crisis ended. That was lucky. We were not guaranteed luck.
kky
5d ago
a country that had just lost a war
This is the excuse that the defeatists gave in the moment, but in fact they had not lost the war, and de Gaulle went on to win it. Had he the advantage of the French fleet and a loyal army evacuated to North Africa (which the Germans could not touch, in accordance with what their generals were writing at the time and in retrospect), one can only imagine the process being smoother. The armistice question was also up in the air for longer than you suggest.
George Lucas was probably thinking of a combination of Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.
None of these were known as kindly old men in whom the country could trust in trying times and who was willing and eagerly voted excessive powers by a legislative body feeling lost and ineffective, which is Lucas’ text here. The first (whichever you choose) won a civil war and set terms. The second leveraged a generalcy into a coup. The third used a popular movement of angry young men to quell opposition and gain legitimacy. None were voted in by a deceived parliament thinking it was a jolly good thing too. On the other hand, Petain is actually a good parallel to the literal text. I suggest the Wikipedia analysis, insofar as it ignores the words, is misguided.
kky
6d ago
Yeah, I think it’s mostly about what makes for better TV. A riot from people who you can allege are trying to hang the Speaker is immediate, visceral, you don’t need to know much to enjoy it. A plan to file paperwork wrong, deliberately, is comparatively lame. Could paperwork be that important?
It reminds me of that scene from the old Star Wars movie where everyone is voting away their rights in favor of an emperor. Or, if you prefer, the actual event I think it was based on, which was really two events: the selection of Marshal Petain as the head of an interim French government to negotiate capitulation with Hitler, and the subsequent vote to give him unlimited constitutional powers. The first was rather popular, as everyone thought well of Petain, and the second was forced through with the assistance of ruffians shouting down from the galleries and thuggish ministers physically blocking a floor debate. George Lucas preferred the first scene over the second, for some reason. Really makes you think, huh.
kky
6d ago
The riot on Jan 6 was a distraction, a representation of the real danger, which was the Eastman plan to attempt to present an alternate slate of electors and undo the results of the election.
This was way more dangerous than you’re letting on. If it had succeeded, then essentially any amount of violence from the left would have been justified, because the formal process of the election was undermined.
The rioters, sure, they were not as damaging. But seriously wargame the next moves in America if that plan worked. It’s not pretty.
kky
6d ago
There is a bright line which I hope the backlash does not cross. The bright line is the support for political violence and terrorist acts. The American left has been extraordinarily undisciplined about advocating these things. (The right has been modestly better mostly by virtue of getting kicked off most sites but 4chan, where you can go find advocacy for political violence and terrorist acts if you so desire.)
If the effect of this winds up being that advocating for violence on social media becomes extremely unpopular, that would be an excellent thing for America. It would be a real cooling of the overall temperature. If, instead, it becomes an excuse for the lunatic right to breach containment, it would be quite bad.
The cancel culture part is honestly much less important than this. Part of how things went south in France in the early 20th was people coordinating with one another to one-up on crazy demands to destroy the Other on their niche media (newspapers). The temperature kept going up and it made it impossible for people to cooperate on anything, even keeping the Germans from conquering them. Free speech is highly important, but the standard criticism is that speech acts are real and form a weakness to a blanket policy thereof. Advocating popular and political violence is one such act.
kky
7d ago
I’m going to highlight what I think is interesting and valuable about this comment, which I see being totally lost in the outrage in other replies. Forgive me if this isn’t original, OP.
Mangione’s motive - and potentially this other shooter’s motive, too - was not the strategic implementation of political principle. It was extremely personal, and the personal elements are what actually drove the murder. This is similar to past assassinations, like the schizo in Minnesota who believed he was personally carrying out Walz’s will on Earth.
But the murder, which was to the killer personal, became public. And when it became public, the public used it for their own purposes. The personal element was consumed by the strategic implementation of other people’s political principles. Kirk’s death may (let’s accept OP’s premise) have been just the expression of a personal idea, intent, purpose, but that’s gone now. All that remains is politics.
Or, in the words of someone far wiser than I:
But none of these templates are true, in the sense that there's no causality. They are merely post hoc descriptive. And since dead men tell no tales, you can pretty much describe one any way you want, for your own purposes.
If Joe Stack had reflected on that, he would never have hit the ignition.
kky
11d ago
What do you mean? Nutjobs are definitionally the most likely people to commit senseless violence, since they’ve taken leave of theirs. They’re also very likely to have spotty political records because their political beliefs are concretely a stand-in for their own unstable emotions. This is largely dog bites man news.
The issue is that the overall environment is heated enough that madmen take assassination as their preferred form of acting out, instead of stripping naked in public and announcing the end times.
kky
11d ago
The comparison is made much, much worse by the obvious fact that THIS black man WAS sitting in the back…
kky
11d ago
The missing part of all of these stories, IMO, is: where does the shared money go? If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice. In larger society we leave that to the government, or at least a local church, at significantly higher graft than my hypothetical, and someone trying to “make it on his own” is an obvious tax evader.
But I expect this isn’t the whole story, and the reality is an excess of men who don’t work or women who aren’t married or an unusual quantity of drink for the amount of money earned. That’s what’s really wrong: the family exerts authority to tax, but not authority to force good behavior. That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.
But I’d be interested in the specifics. The above is largely prejudice.
kky
11d ago
nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany
Interesting - I live near a little Persian exclave. There’s a few Persian restaurants down the way. Guess they’re hard to find, though.
For bread, there’s a half-decent place I know of, but for anything good I’d recommend Wisconsin. It’s technically coastal.
kky
12d ago
Self-sacrifice, I think, is born in part of the realization that nothing important is sacrificed.
If people believe the “self” is paramount, they will sacrifice everything at that altar. That’s a pretty tidy modus ponens. Reality is that the self is nothing but a heat haze. It comes, and it passes. There are other things more enduring. Duty, for instance. Then it’s easy to do things that are hard.
The other day, my father said to me: “I don’t really feel pain as deeply as other people. I think it’s because, in my youth, I had a few times when I was in really intense pain, and couldn’t do anything about it. So, I suppose, my body learned it wasn’t anything life-threatening. So it doesn’t bother me any more.” So too threats to the “self.” One lives through them. But enforcing it, I think, may just make it worse. Simply support them. Show the fruits of another life, and they may be persuaded.
kky
15d ago
Here’s my take from a few bosses and couple upgrades in.
Overall, the game’s pretty fun and meaningfully more difficult than the first. I feel pretty confident saying this. I 100%ed (112%) the first game deathless, and it wasn’t that hard. I’ve gone back to it a couple of times and it’s been very easy to pick back up. On my first play through I even got several bosses on my first try. Silksong is not giving me trouble on the level of, say, Sekiro, but it’s not nearly so easy.
I think there are two elements driving this. First, the enemies all have truly obnoxious amounts of health. It feels like every fight takes about 1.5 to 2x what it would in the original. IMO this is a hard miss. The original had a challenge mode for forcing boss completion with perfect or near-perfect mechanics. Extending the time to complete a boss will force perfect mechanics but honestly gets quite boring. I’ve so far found it pretty straightforward to learn mechanics and perform for a few minutes, but it’s not the best experience.
The second part is that the movement in the game is way messier than the first. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first game had exceptionally clean movement, which made it a tactile delight to play. Silksong’s movement is comparatively weird. My hands are well practiced in Hollow Knight movement, and I have a hard time adjusting to the different down attack movement. This is one change of many. So some of this challenge is just a learning curve. Back to Sekiro, I had to eat dirt at the first actual boss for something like an hour to get the main mechanics under control. That’s table stakes. I also suspect that using the non-basic attack options (“tools”) is much more important than in most games in the genre, but a serious miss here is that the degree of their importance is not obvious from menus… This means that the player is not quite encouraged to experiment. For all of these I expect that the game will shake out over time, and I do like the systems even if they do not come naturally.
Last thought. The areas of the game so far have been lackluster. Hollow Knight made it very clear how the pieces tied together into a unified whole. The starting area is literally a crossroads suggesting what was once present in that land. In Silksong you start in an iron foundry that is apparently still active. I don’t know what to make of that except that the devs wanted both a lava level and red ants, which I believe got cut from Hollow Knight. If this game is eight years in the making for cutting-room floor scraps from the original it leaves much to be desired. But I’ll wait on that judgment.
kky
19d ago
This is roughly correct. For the debt reform to work without a moral hazard, the part(ies) who profited most from the debt must be heavily punished.
One way to accomplish this would be to, instead of debt forgiveness, to allow former students to settle their debt with the proceeds of a lawsuit against their alma mater at the cost of their degree. Think your degree wasn’t worth the cost? Just return the defective goods…
That’s not what I mean to imply.
I have an acquaintance with family in South Africa. Things there are legitimately quite bad. I would not travel there - and yet, I don’t feel nearly so strongly about things which happen there as things in the US, even if they’re more severe. That’s because I don’t live there. My day to day is not affected by it, and does not affect it.
On the other hand, I live in the US, and take things much more seriously here.
That’s a very fair point. I don’t necessarily recommend living life on the internet, but understanding that moralizing is not going to affect your day-to-day, I understand why this is a big deal for you. This was a very internet killing, and as such happened in your back yard, and now you have to deal with the consequences. Thanks for explaining it.
Quite frequently, when people care very strongly about something that has little direct relation to them, it’s because it’s a symbol for something that does relate to them. I wasn’t sure whether this was happening for you, but it sounds like it isn’t.
Tactically, I disagree, it was the right-wing retreat from academia that precipitated these problems. The left wanted to kick the right out, and the right let that happen long enough that an unacceptable proportion of the youth got educated in an echo chamber. That meant the online flame wars in early Tumblr days were a losing cause, since social media companies were hiring the lefties and not the righties. But that’s showbiz.
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